Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-01-11

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz, the incorrigible Katzenjammer twins, as they rope the Captain into clearing snow from a rooftop, then send him sledding off it in an avalanche of his own making. Rudolf Dirks's draftsmanship is energetic and loose: exaggerated bodies tumble across snow-heavy backgrounds, speech balloons carry the strip's signature broken-English dialect, and the ladder becomes a recurring comic prop linking panels into a single flowing gag. Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. It is among the earliest strips to deploy consistent recurring characters, sequential panel grids, and integrated word-balloon dialogue — the structural vocabulary every subsequent comic, strip, and book would inherit.